Hacker News Reader

Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

The idea that this is "history" is PR, and not even particularly good PR at that.

Right now, today, they're shipping literal malware on mainstream desktop computers around the world. Oh, and it's not open source either, lol!

The bloody operating system has targeted advertisements, intentionally unremovable (or at least very difficult to remove) components, telemetry, a keylogger-esque search function, the list goes on.

It pains me to see people shill Microsoft as if they've "turned a corner". All they're doing is the minimum possible in order to be taken seriously by some particularly easily swayed subset of developers whilst simultaneously ratcheting up the pain on the main product that they're known globally for.

View on HN

> shipping literal malware on mainstream desktop computers

Source? None of the things you listed below are /literal malware/.

https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.html

It’s arguably adware, since users paid for the OS and then advertisements have appeared in new places since Windows 10’s initial release. E.g. some ads appeared for many people in the file explorer a few years ago.

Adware is considered a form of malware. Not the worst type of malware by any means but still “literal”.

GNU hosts a list as well; though I believe many items on it to be a stretch, I feel at least a few are justifiable. https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.html

This is a picture from a Windows 10 Enterprise domain joined machine with a whole set of GPOs we try to keep up with this type of stuff: https://imgur.com/a/M5d9MVt

That's a lot of space devoted to just old versions of games. I understand malware has a specific definition, but I don't know what's in these folders and we obviously didn't want them on user machines.

Deleting them required a whole dance around SYSTEM access, it was insane.

Enterprise.

Yeah that sounds like a big headache and pretty bad behavior by ms.

Strictly not malware though.

RMS once said "proprietary software subjugates users". At the time I thought the statement was a little over-the-top.

Now with every bit of windows software hooked into the network, I see it a little differently. (same with basically all phone software)

I see you haven't turned the corner either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com